Introduction

Our word ‘science’ comes from the Latin scientia, meaning ‘knowledge.’ In ancient times, to be a scientist you studied a multitude of things ranging from what we would call biology, physics, psychology and philosophy. In modern times, science has become a balkanized and meticulous questioning of the world around and within us. But why have the methods of science becomes so stringent? What makes science so difficult? It is difficult perhaps because of the nature of the questions that science asks. That is, while the practice of science is often rigorous and particular, the driving questions behind the discipline are more philosophical. Further, the rigor of science is due to a difficult problem in philosophy, of epistemology. Science is difficult because knowledge of anything is difficult.

It seems that one of the primary driving forces behind all scientific programs is the question “What is Truth?” For example when we ask about the nature of the atom, we are asking about the truth of the atom, how it actually is. The problem is how to determine what the truth about things is, and this problem has led to a number of arguments within the field of the Philosophy of Science. Some want to argue that when we develop a theory about this or that, the goal is for the theory to accurately describe the actual reality—the real Truth—of the thing we are describing with our theory. And ultimately, this is what we are trying to do when we do science, even if some anti-realist wants to point out the impossibility of doing so. It is the difficulty of determining the Truth that makes the scientific method so difficult and gives the anti-realist a job.

The anti-realist’s job is to remind us that the work of scientists, although valuable, may not be giving us any truth at all, but merely some kind of construction based upon limited resources. This is a point based on the notion that when we develop a theory, we have a problem in showing that the theory is really true, that is, we cannot prove that it corresponds with reality in the way that a realist wishes. But the debate between realists and anti-realists is not about proving what ideas are upheld by evidence, as Musgrave has demonstrated.[1] Instead, the argument is one over an epistemological question; is it possible to say that the phenomena that we experience correlates sufficiently to the real world, allowing us to claim that the theories we develop describe real entities and forces responsible for their relationships? That is to say that the problem overflows into greater philosophical problems, and must be dealt with in terms of them.

The first issue that must be addressed is the problem of perception through the senses. How does this process take place and how much credibility can we give it? After this the problem will shift towards the relationship between entities in the world and how they are interpreted and how they relate to one another in our minds. Are the relationships based upon something actual and real or are they categories imposed upon the world? Thirdly we can begin to deal with the arguments of the realists and the anti-realists in order to see how each camp deals with these epistemological problems. It will be my attempt to show that the realist and the anti-realist have different degrees of sufficiency for establishing acceptability of a theory as either “true” or “adequate.” The realist is willing to make a stronger claim about the relationship between his theory and the “Truth” than the anti-realist, who remains more epistemologically skeptical. Finally, I wish to demonstrate that it is the anti-realist approach that is ultimately still useful to us, but only insofar as it retains the skepticism that realism tries to avoid. Due to the limited information we have about the world, as well as our limited capability to conceive of the world, it would be impossible for us to claim truth about a theory, no matter if the entities of the theory are correct or not. A theory is a mere instrument to approximately describe the world in the face of an overwhelming amount of information that may never be completely described by any theory.

The Problem of Perception in Science

Whether we assume a dualistic or monistic nature of our being, most of us will concede that we must rely on the body to take in information about the world. Only a true monistic idealist, who argues that we are but spirits without bodies, would argue against this view—perhaps the solipsists as well. But since the solipsists don’t believe we exist anyway, we can let them be and ignore them. That being said, I feel it is safe to assume that we have to deal with the fact that we have eyes, ears, and the other sensory devices of the body to rely on in order to take information in about the world. It is from this basic sensory information that the empirical methods in science are based.

There is no question that our sensory apparati are limited in their ability to interpret all of the information out there. The resolution of our eyesight is not perfect, our hearing misses many pitches both low and high, and there may be tastes possible that no tongue has been able to interpret, and so on. Further, there are forces, entities and the like all around us that our sensory equipment cannot pick up at all, such as ultraviolet radiation and neutrinos. Thus it is no surprise that it took our species so long to discover them; we had to invent specific instruments to detect them and to study them.

But it is also clear that our sensory equipment does something. We receive phenomena, supposedly from the outside “real” world, all the time. The realist assumption here is that the phenomena we receive comes from actual objects out there, and this seems to be a reasonable conclusion to make. The question is not so much whether there are objects in the world that we perceive, but whether we perceive the correctly or not. Are the phenomena out there are in any way like the way we do see it, and if so, to what degree? The assertion that the phenomena we perceive are from outside of us is fair, but the degree of credibility we give to the nature of the phenomena is a stickier question. It may be that we see the world as it actually is, but that we only see an incomplete percentage of this reality. That is to say that while we see the colors and shapes of the apple as it is (from our point of reference; we cannot expect to see it as it is from all directions and dimensions), we have no idea how to perceive it in terms if infrared, ultraviolet, etc without the assistance of technology.

Consider that the objects in the world give off more data than we pick up with our 5 senses. Imagine how they would be perceived if nature had given us 2 or 3 more sensory organs. But since we were not given these organs, science also relies on the various instruments we have invented, which feed us the information in a way that we can perceive, supposedly without having significantly altered the information through the translation. Thus, much of scientific data will not come directly to our senses, but will be processed into a form of data that we can deal with; charts, quantities, and conceptual maps for example. Thus, we can consider these scientific instruments as part of our perceptive orchestra, but perhaps to a lesser degree than the eyes, ears, and nose. That is, while we can use them to collect data, we have to be careful how much we consider the data they collect like the phenomena that our eyes or ears collect.

This brings up the problem of whether or not the world actually conforms to the structure we give it, and whether the charts, quantities, and conceptual maps are accurate representations or an imposed structure upon the world for our digestion. If we were to say that the instruments of science themselves are epistemologically distancing factors for our ability to claim theory as truth, then a further problem is introduced by considering how our own equipment deals with the data that these external tools feed us—that is, the brain.

The Problem of Imposed Order

This problem is in part based upon the problem of induction, and thus on the skepticism of David Hume. But it goes further than that, and also brings in Immanuel Kant and his categories. The nature of the problem goes something like this; the information we have about the outside world from the senses and the scientific instruments cannot allow us to infer either any logical order on the world or determine actual relationships between things, as these relationships may be imposed and not actual. We have insufficient reason to accept that the relationships, qualities, etc of the objects of our observation actually have all the attributes we see in them. In short, we may have insufficient reason to accept that the world is ordered as we think it is. Thus, the relationships that we call ‘laws of nature’ or ‘theories’ might be imposed structures upon the world and not real descriptions of the world.

Hume’s skepticism would not allow us to infer that relationships, such as causation, are logically certain in the world merely because we have seen one event follow another in our prior observations. How can we make universal statements about observations without generalizing what we have seen in the past? Hume argues that we cannot infer, logically, that the events observed in the past say anything about the future. While each observed case may lend more credibility in a psychological sense, it does not make it more likely to be true in a logical or mathematical sense. Thus, there is not a strictly logical basis for establishing generalizations as Truths, although there may be a basis for having some generalization considered rationally acceptable, perhaps even empirically adequate.

It is possible that the way our intellectual apparatus works actually changes the nature of the data it receives, so that when we reflect upon the information about the world we are looking at skewed interpretation of those phenomena. It will remain here a problem the matter of how to determine how skewed this interpretation would be, as it would require some sort of way of checking it with an objective source, one which we may not have. What does not seem probable is the proposition stating that the world exists precisely how we see it. This is not only for the reasons mentioned above (limited sensory data and the like) but also because we do make judgments about things that influence how we think about them.

A large part of how we interpret the world is not due simply to the raw data, but is dependent on the context in which it is observed and the auxiliary assumptions and information that it depends on. As Duhem and Quine have showed, theories do not exist in vacuums, but are interconnected in a network of belief. Observations said to support (or not support) a theory will be dependent upon the acceptance and strength of related theories, and will also, in turn, influence our view of those related theories. In other words, there may be a dynamic interplay between the categories in our heads that we use to interpret new data and the data itself; they may support each other in some quasi-Kantian sense.

Ayer’s treatment of how we designate laws of nature in is essay “What is a Law of Nature?”[2] may also be helpful here. As Dretske summarizes it for us in his essay “Laws of Nature,”[3] Ayer argues that a law of nature is simply a universal truth, essentially a generalization, plus some other factor Dretske calls “X.” Ayer’s view is that “X” has to do more with how people feel about the universal statement than any empirical or logical factor. This may be a valid point; after all, we are merely human beings and not logic machines.

Our scientific worldviews are based upon evidential support while at the same time incomplete in comparison with the potential data. It is our worldviews that build theories, not empirical data itself. Thus, we are forced to construct theories only in part based on empirical data. The rest is a function of the rest of our experiences, opinions, etc which may or may not be scientifically valid or coherent. Sometimes what happens is the information available to us is sufficient to say either that we can rationally accept one theory over the other or to accept a theory by itself. Otherwise we might decide that we should either refuse to accept any theory or pick the one that fits into our worldview the best; a worldview that may not be systematically constructed enough to be coherent or cohesive with all available information.

Realism and Anti-Realism

The difference between the realist and the anti-realist is not only one of epistemological criteria, but also of whether or not someone is trying to be human-centric or reality-centric. The realist tries to focus on what is objective, what is outside of the human perspective, while the anti-realist argues that one cannot escape their subjective experience. This is primarily a phenomenological problem, perhaps one to be tackled by an existential perspective. Dealing with reality can be compared to a subject “thrown in to the world” and forced to reckon with a reality outside of the self as an “Other.”[4] The self cannot penetrate this otherness so it is forced to interpret the structure of the thing outside of itself by observing what it does, how it reacts to certain environments, etc.

It is interesting to bring this existentialist perspective to science because many existentialists, in particular Jean-Paul Sartre, are critical of the Kantian approach which is also useful in dealing with this problem of dealing with the world around us (an interesting comparison that is well beyond the scope of this study). With Kant’s approach we are put in a position to ask if he relationship between the world and our conceptions are coherent or if they are divergent in some sense. Are theories pictures of the world or are they constructions based upon what fallible and limited information we have of it? The realist holds the view that when we have a theory it talks about entities and forces that are actual parts to the world. The job of science is to go out there and look for the entities and find out how they behave and interact in different environments. A theory is a crystallization of this empirical research of the world in a form that can explain and predict events. Further, the theory is said to be true because it accurately describes the world.

Maxwell’s example of “crobes” in his essay “The Ontological Status of Theoretical Entities” makes the point that even though all of these entities and their relationships are not known to us due to limitations of our natural sense abilities, if they are real entities then they are (potentially) observable. The observability of certain entities is only hidden from us due to technological insufficiencies and not because the entities do not exist or are unobservable. Thus, the theoretical entities that have not yet been observed will be observed in the future. This is an interesting point, and has a lot of validity due to the fact that discoveries such as his ‘crobe’ analogy have occurred in the history of science such as microbes, as the analogy implies.

Van Fraasen addresses Maxwell’s essay and agrees with much of what he has to say, but only to a point. He agrees that there are real objects in the world that we observe and he agrees that there are some things that are only observable with the help of technology, but this is hardly the point. Van Fraasen’s challenge is that a theory does not have to be true in order to be a good theory.[5] Thus, the fact that things we can observe exist in the real world is not the matter of contention. The first point at issue is whether we can infer that things theorized to exist can be said to actually exist due to indirect observation, such as with sub-atomic particles or black holes, or the promise of future technologies that will make it possible, as in Maxwell’s example of ‘crobes.’ The second point of contention is whether empirical evidence through observation, direct or indirect, can infer truth in a theory rather than “empirical adequacy.” The term ‘truth’ is a strong one, and implies no epistemological skepticism in holding the theory. On the Bayesian scale, this would be of a probability value of 1, and would have to be a necessary truth, which I don’t think would be a reasonable assessment of the situation in contemporary science of any theory due to our lack of knowledge.

Alan Musgrave replies to both Maxwell and van Fraasen, but ultimately holds onto realism as the victor. He concedes some points to van Fraasen and the other anti-realists, and assesses the situation thus:

The distinction between truth and empirical adequacy, and hence between realism and constructive empiricism, is a subtle one. For theories about the observable, truth and empirical adequacy coincide…. For theories about the unobservable, truth entails empirical adequacy but not vice versa: such a theory may be empirically adequate yet false.[6]

In other words your certainty of a theory’s truth does not guarantee its truth, no matter how good the evidence is. But Musgrave takes another step here in order to show that he is indeed not defending an anti-realist position. After discussing how van Fraasen uses skepticism as a means for challenging truth via empirical evidence, Musgrave says that

The same skeptical arguments might be used to show that we can never know a scientific theory to be empirically adequate nor ever be rationally warranted in accepting…[7]

And while van Fraasen seems to be aware that he is not completely immune to this skepticism, he does not feel that he is sticking his neck out as far as the realist is, as Musgrave demonstrates with a quote from van Fraasen:

…in accepting any theory as empirically adequate, I am sticking my neck out. There is no argument there for belief in the truth of the accepted theories, since it is not an epistemological principle that one might as well hang for a sheep as for a lamb.[8]

Thus, van Fraasen and Musgrave seem to agree on the facts here, but seem to differ on which way to interpret how to take the next step. Van Fraasen argues that we be more epistemologically prudent here and not try to claim truth where the issue of empirical certainty is still at issue. Musgrave on the other hand seems to think that we have a more certain position with realism, so we might as well accept the realist approach. To make his point, he compares realism and anti-realism by use of an analogy of two criminal acts with identical risks and punishments, while one grants a greater reward. For Musgrave, realism gives a greater reward in giving a more certain position, but this does not seem to be the case.

Realism may give more of an apparent reward, but since it is still at issue whether the theory is true and neither empirical adequacy nor truth are certain, we can only identify Musgrave’s position as a wager similar to that of Pascal. There is something to be lost in this wager if we side with Musgrave, and that is dogmatism and wishful thinking. If we wager, given insufficient reason to know for sure, that a theory is true rather than empirically adequate, then we risk closing off ourselves to alternative possibilities that might end up being more empirically adequate. Further, it seems that wagering for truth is simply a way of making a leap of faith. This kind of leap has no place in Musgrave’s arsenal unless he agrees with Ayer’s take on laws of nature.

The criticism might be leveled that this is more of a psychological danger than a logical one, but so is Musgrave’s. For Musgrave, who is arguing for realism, saying that the truth is decided by how people feel about it seems to incoherent with realism’s lofty goals. Musgrave’s thought that more is gained by calling a theory true rather than simply empirically adequate seems like a psychological crutch. Calling a rose a stink-blossom does not make it smell any less sweet; calling a theory true does not make so. A further criticism might be that granting the status of truth to a theory will not result in scientific dogmatism, and this is valid. However, given that the evidence could be read as true or empirically adequate, it seems that it would be much less likely to result in dogmatism if the theory is given the status of empirical adequacy. Further, Musgrave’s wager itself is built upon a psychological tendency, if not need, to attain certainty. But this certainty is really a constructed one, one might say, an empirical construction. Thus Musgrave is advocating scientific wishful thinking while using no more empirical evidence than van Fraasen when he calls the same theory empirically adequate.

So far in the history of science we have seen many theorized entities doubted then proved by improvement of technology—microscopes, telescopes, etc. But does this imply that further advance will necessarily result in the observation of other theorized entities? There have been many other theoretical entities in the history of science that have not been found because they do not exist. One of the better examples is ‘phlogiston,’ which was theorized as what was responsible for the flammability of substances but ended up being a myth. Phlogiston was theorized in order to explain something, and it ended up being the incorrect explanation. What should be taken from this is that what is really going on when we posit a theoretical entity, we are positing a source of explanation for an event. An anti-realist might be better off observing that when an unobserved entity is theorized to exist, what is really happening is the source of whatever occurrence being explained is crystallized into a theory that is empirically testable. It is not so much the entity in question, but the theory itself.

When we look into the structure of an atom and notice evidence for something comprising it, we have to come up with some way to conceptualize it. And since everything else we have seen in the physical sciences has parts, why not postulate the existence of a smaller part and give it a name? And if, upon further testing, this evidence is duplicated, and we are able to learn more and more about the hypothesized entity, we have more reason to give the theory empirical adequacy. The realist might look at this and say that the theory has been proven true, but the anti-realist position allows for the theory’s incompletion in terms of relation to other theories, more close examination, and the subsequent improvements that might alter the theory slightly. If the possibility exists that the theory is even slightly incomplete or incorrect, then the theory cannot be called “true.” Thus, the anti-realist backs off this epistemological step and gives the theory a tentative status of empirically adequate, allowing further growth of the theory.

The point that the anti-realist is making is that when we are asserting a theory as true, we are prematurely blowing the whistle on the issue. It is possible that the realist is thus trying to impose an order upon the world, while the anti-realist is merely observing that the evidence we do have is so far consistent, but not complete and thus not sufficient to call it “true.” There is too much of an epistemic gap to say this.

A different Kind of Incompleteness Theorem

In a sense the issue between realists and anti-realists is a non-problem. The question thus far has been about epistemological certainty, and neither the realist nor the anti-realist has an actual edge over the other in this respect. They both have the same empirical evidence; it is a mere semantic matter of what to call this empirical evidence as it relates to the theory. And from this point of view the anti-realist has an edge in that it does not try to claim that the theory as it stands is not the “truth” but is still open to further clarification and challenges from alternatives. There is more going on here than mere epistemological semantics. What else there is will occupy the remainder of this essay.

There is another level in the debate between realism and anti-realism that must be addressed, one that will make the issue one less of epistemology than metaphysics. But more directly than metaphysics, it deals with methodology. The concern is how we approach the world in terms of theories, not how the world relates to the theory. It has been shown that epistemologically realism and anti-realism are too close in order to announce a real winner. Thus other considerations must be considered if a true preference is to be rationally asserted. Musgrave seems to accept this when he says that van Fraasen’s anti-realism is “correspondingly closer to realism.”[9] In other words, they both seem to be headed for the same destination.

The assumption seems to be that theories are actually supposed to depict the world; that it is supposed to be a map of some sort. The argument has been around how closely this depiction can be compared to the real world. The realist assumes not only that this part of the theory talks about that entity and that part of the theory talks about another part of reality but that this level of coherence between theory and reality is even possible. On what basis can we say that this would be possible? For us to say that the theory is able to depict the world as a map does already presumes a kind of realism. This problem of a theory’s relationship to the world is not the real problem because it seems evident that in some fashion reality is referred to in a theory, after all that is why we make theories. The problem is not what a theory is said to do, but how it is said to do it.

Science has existed for hundreds of years, perhaps thousands depending on how we define science. But science has presumed many things about the world, in part due to its relationship with religion in its development but also due to the common sense notions we conclude due to the way we perceive the world. That is, we are forced to utilize the physical senses in order to look at the world empirically as well as the categories of thought our brains our capable of. These categories of thought are, however, based upon the sense-data we are able to use from our sensory equipment, perhaps limiting what we can think about and how we can think about it. But before generalizing the problem further I want consider a familiar yet altered hypothetical example.

I do not think Maxwell will mind too much if I borrow his example for the purpose of illustration. Let’s say we visit Maxwell’s scientist[10] before the invention of the microscope and talk to him about his theory. If we ask him what he is trying to discover or what problem he is trying to solve, he might tell us that he has a theory about how certain sicknesses get transferred from person to person. He might tell us that small, perhaps “bug-like” things carry diseases and when we have this disease and get near healthy people, we can pass off some of these bug-like things and they can get sick. Upon urging him to give them a name, he calls them “crobes,” perhaps because he knows a guy whom he dislikes intensely whose last name is Crobe or some other arbitrary or non-arbitrary reason. He then goes on to describe his theory to me in as much detail as he is able to give based on what information he has collected.

At this point our scientist has postulated the existence of some kind of entity that actually exists in the world and has a certain function, for good or evil, to play in it. As of yet his evidence for these entities is circumstantial, and none have actually been observed—that is seen with the eye, even with the assistance of any technology. But from the observation of what could only be called infection—people who are sick tend to make healthy people around them sick, and so on—his theory about infectious disease via “crobes” so far holds up. Thus far, the evidence is empirically adequate, as it “saves the phenomena.” Yet at the same time the theory is underdetermined as someone else could postulate that evil spirits cause sickness and this is how infection occurs, for example.

Now, as with Maxwell, the first compound microscope is invented and our scientist gets a hold of it. Upon use of this new tool, he has collected sufficient and logically coherent evidence supporting not only that these ‘crobes’ exist (he has seen them under the microscope), but he has seen them confirm his theory about their relation to the infection of others. Has the realist enough information now? Yes and no. The scientist has enough to say that there is something in the real world that the theory describes to some degree of accuracy, so he can say that the entity is real in some fashion (perhaps). But, at the same time, what the scientist cannot say is that his theory is true. This is due to the reasons described above; that the theory may be perpetually incomplete as surrounding theories will still be incomplete and there will still be more layers of reality about these crobes (perhaps now called “microbes”) that remain unknown. Thus the theory can never be true if still potentially incomplete, even if it is clear enough (empirically adequate enough) that there is actually something in the world that the theory refers to.

This incompleteness of theories is due to the fact that we construct theories based on how we are able to conceive of the world, which is due to how we perceive the world. The significant point to make here is that before any actual observation was made of any entity it was assumed that the cause of the event—in this case infection—was based upon how we understand the world to operate. And this should be no surprise; remember that we are forced to perceive the world through senses, and these senses see objects that ultimately are made up of smaller objects put together in a certain way. Further, humans have been seeing the world this way for millions of years with very little to challenge it. Sure, religious mysticism and philosophical Platonism has come up with the idea of a spiritual substance that is more real and more “us” than our “prison-like bodies.” But all of empirical research seems to find physical-based theories to be testable and spiritual ones to be empirically inadequate because all science is based upon either our senses or the tools we use to translate the world into information digestible by the senses.

I’m not playing a nasty trick here and I have not suddenly turned 180º towards some anti-materialistic approach. It is not my intention to argue that the physical world does not exist, but only that it may not exist as we perceive it to exist. For any theory A to be true in the realist sense, not only does it have to refer to real entities in the world, but it also has to be complete. For this to occur all theories related to A, insofar as they effect the entities referred to in theory A and whether they are adjacent theories or sub-theories to A, must be also fully complete. Further, all occurrences in the world that are related to the referents of theory A must also be correctly theorized about, leaving no leaf unturned that might also play a factor in the world theorized by A. If there is anything unknown about the part of or effects the world described by theory A, then the theory can be said to be incomplete and therefore not true in the realist sense.

Consider what Quantum Theory has done to physics in general, as well as some potential implications of it. Before Quantum Theory came about, many scientists thought that they were approaching the understanding of nature. Now we realize that we had only just stepped up to the door, and that behind it laid a behemoth that would be the source of many headaches in the world of science. Quantum Mechanics deals with just about every aspect of scientific research, as it is the basis for how just about everything we study works. How could any theory of biology, chemistry, or even psychology be a true theory if there are aspects of the world that are fundamental to the objects of study for these and other fields which we barely understand? How can we be as audacious to claim that we have enough empirical evidence to call a theory true when all of the factors related to these theories—entities, forces, etc—are not completely understood.

Our minds have been formed through experience with the world at a macro level, thus we might be ill-equipped to understand how the fields of scientific study and its theories could be better explained by understanding Quantum Theory. How can we even claim that it is enough to say that the phenomena has been saved when it is obvious that we are only utilizing phenomena that we understand at a level (the macro level) that is based upon a more fundamental level of reality (the quantum level) that we hardly understand? Further, how do we approach understanding this level of reality when everything else we know of is based upon a model of thought that has been evolutionarily formed over millions of years and did not include this quantum level? If our brains evolved in such a way to understand the world at a macro level, and if the quantum level operates upon different rules, then we may never be able to have a complete and true theory, as theories are created and exist within the mind.

Conclusion

Thus, question of realism versus anti-realism is an essentially epistemological and semantic question. Both points of view assume that the empirical evidence is at least adequate for what our sensory equipment allows us to see. However, anti-realism may be the more salvageable of the two, as it at least does not claim the status of truth for its theories. Anti-realism allows us, at least, to consider the method that I want to illuminate here. This methodology is based upon the notion that we do have phenomena, and if we are going to theorize about the world we must make sure that the theory at least will try to “save” this phenomena. But this method is going to have to also recognize that this is all it can do, and that ultimately a theory will be an instrument to describe reality only from the point of view of the human being in a human body armed with human sensory equipment.

And while we continue the research into the sub-atomic and perhaps beyond, we will have to keeping mind that it is possible that no theory will be complete. The only level of truth that can be granted to theoretical entities will be to say that they exist in some fashion. But as these entities are going to be empirically understood via categories of thought which are limited to the experience we have with the world at the macro level, we will have to concede that we may not be able to ever attain the ideal of a realist perspective. We just do not have the tools to understand the world on all levels, whether it is at the very small scale of the very large scale (can we begin to understand the cosmos from the point of view of mega-clusters of galaxies any better than we can understand it from the point of view of an electron?).

In this sense this demonstrates how the anti-realist is promoting a form of nominalism in which we see something to describe yet cannot say what it is due to epistemological limitations. At the critical point where the entity is observed more closely, it may conform to the theory nearly completely, in part, or almost not at all. Nonetheless the name given it will stick and we will be stuck checking the data against our conceptual model. We have an idea that something is there, but cannot say how it is there. We are not much unlike Democritus when he proposed the existence of atoms in ancient Greece. He theorized that something was there and called it an “atom.” And while he turned out to be correct (and we do indeed still call it an ‘atom’), that is about the extent of what he could say that was true. But is our atomic theory any more realist than that of Democritus? I don’t think so. The theory we have today is just more complex, perhaps more empirically inadequate, as the tools we have to describe the world at that level of reality have improved. But these tools still have to translate the data into a format digestible by the brain.

Thus the debate between realists and anti-realists is really a non-issue, as the realist is simply accepting that the evidence given him is worthy of belief due to a strong sense of empirical adequacy while the anti-realist is merely pointing out that we don’t know enough about the world, particularly the unobserved parts, to feel that the theory talks about “truth”—whatever that is. Perhaps someday we will have even better sensory equipment, as Maxwell says, but that will still not help with the lack of software to conceive of things at the level we will need in order to ever have a complete, thus true, theory.

The only way out of this anti-realist trap is to find a way of improving our capability of understanding how the world works at all levels, quantum and cosmic included. This may come about due to more experience with the data, but it is going to take a large amount of effort to either change the way our brains think or to show that our understanding of the world at the macro level is sufficient to understand it at the quantum and cosmic levels. It might turn out that we are capable of thinking about the world at these levels, but it is going to require us to re-define the methods of scientific research in such a way that we are no longer so strongly dependent upon the 5 senses and the tools we use to translate the world into data digestible by these senses. To achieve a realist perspective we will literally have to change the way we think. (I propose philosophy as a place to start).

[1] Cf. Curd, pp. 1088-1094. All page numbers will refer to Curd, Martin and J.A. Cover. [eds.] Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues. W.W. Norton & Company. New York, 1998.

[4] This is a reference to the Existentialist perspective of Jean-Paul Sartre mostly. Cf. Being and Nothingness.

[6] Musgrave, Alan. “Realism versus Constructive Empiricism” p. 1089